Many organizations, such as large multinational financial institutions, maintain as part of their portfolio of wealth management services the ability to distribute retirement investment products, such as annuities issued by insurance companies. Accordingly, one or more divisions of a financial institution may be comprised of sales forces licensed to sell insurance related products to consumers. The individuals (e.g., financial advisors or agents) comprising these sales forces typically meet with interested consumers, draft necessary documents for the consumers, and then send the documents to the appropriate insurance carriers, which are the entities or companies that actually issue the insurance contracts to the desiring consumers.
Annuities are one type of insurance product commonly sold to consumers by an insurance distribution company or division of a larger company involved in wealth management and/or investment services. In simple terms, an annuity is a contract between a consumer (the insured) and an insurance carrier or company (the insurer), under which the consumer makes a lump-sum payment or series of payments to the carrier and in return the insurance carrier agrees to make periodic payments to the consumer beginning immediately or at some future date. Once such a policy has been issued, any time that a financial advisor, insurance distribution company, carrier or customer associated with the policy wishes to make a change to the underlying contract, the desired change must be requested and authorized over the telephone or in writing, often including multiple communication exchanges between the various entities or parties involved.
The rapid pace of today's digital world has transformed the nature of business-to-business interactions such that nearly all communications passed between different entities associated with a transaction are in electronic form. The numerous communications involved in initiating and processing a change to an existing annuity should similarly be conducted electronically.